Barbara Branden, the first biographer of Ayn Rand with her penetrating and humanizing The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), has died at age 84. Branden and her then-husband Nathaniel Branden were Rand's closest associates and friends during the years she finished writing Atlas Shrugged and the years when the Nathaniel Branden Institute began teaching the principles of Rand's Objectivism in lecture form to a wider world.